Director Jonas Carpignano unpacks his engrossing coming-of-age thriller, which represents an Italian-language version of The Sopranos – as told from the daughter’s perspective
Swamy Rotolo was nine years old when she was cast as the 15-year-old protagonist of Jonas Carpignano’s engrossing coming-of-age thriller A Chiara. Not that she knew it at the time. In 2014, Rotolo was auditioning for the blink-and-you-miss-it role of Chiara in Carpignano’s second feature, A Ciambra; in private, though, the Italian-American director envisioned a follow-up movie with Chiara in every scene. The Boyhood-esque gamble worked: for her expressive, believable turn in A Chiara, Rotolo, now 17, became the youngest-ever Best Actress winner at the David di Donatello Awards – effectively Italy’s version of the Oscars.
It helps, one imagines, that Rotolo stars in A Chiara alongside her real-life relatives, all of whom lend the drama an emotional chemistry that cannot be faked. Chiara, too, is based on Rotolo herself, from her no-longer secret smoking habit to a penchant for electropop. The fiction then enters at an extravagant birthday party for Chiara’s older sister, Giulia (Giulia Rotolo), who’s turning 18. The family-oriented event already resembles a scene from The Godfather but then a car belonging to Chiara’s father, Claudio (Claudio Rotolo), explodes outside, and Claudio soon vanishes. Chiara suddenly realises she’s Meadow Soprano.
“When I got the idea to write A Chiara, even before I met Swamy, someone I knew well was arrested and put under house arrest,” Carpignano, 38, tells me over the phone from Gioia Tauro, the Calabrian town in which he shot the film. “I remember the impact this had on his daughter. This young girl started looking at herself and her community in a completely different way. She was very outgoing and overnight became closed and aware of the way people looked at her.” But surely a 15-year-old can’t get that far in life without knowing her father’s real occupation? “In my experience in Gioia Tauro and Rosarno, especially the young girls, a lot of them don’t know. When they find out, that reality comes crashing down on them.”
Carpignano was already friends with the Rotolo family when he gave Swamy a cameo in A Ciambra. “I didn’t tell her (about A Chiara) because I didn’t want to get her hopes up,” he says. “Years later, I convinced her to do it.” In the intervening period, Carpignano spent more time with the Rotolos, and scribbled down observations. “I saw Swamy and her sister get into a huge argument, and right after that, I wrote that scene where they get into a fight. The way they’re screaming at each other is the way these girls actually respond to each other.”
After attending film school in New York, Bronx-born Carpignano moved to Gioia Tauro to work on his debut feature, 2015’s Mediterranea. Carpignano, whose mother is African-American and father is Italian, wanted to investigate Calabria after the 2010 race riots, and so Mediterranea depicts the abuse suffered by two Black refugees who arrive in the area. The sort of sequel, 2017’s A Ciambra, was a Martin Scorsese exec-produced drama about a 14-year-old boy in Calabria’s Romani community. Technically, A Chiara closes the trilogy, but it’s really a standalone film, save for a moment when – like in Three Colours: Red – Chiara briefly encounters the protagonists from the previous stories.
The call-back occurs when Chiara explores Calabria beyond her white, privileged bubble, and recognises the poorer neighbourhoods affected by her father’s drug business. “Do you know me?” Chiara asks a stranger staring in her direction. “Of course,” the woman replies. “You’re the daughter of ‘U Picciu’.” Chiara’s subsequent emotions are communicated through close-ups of her face and an overwhelming score by Dan Romer and Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin; at night, the guilt even seeps into her subconscious. “We try to let the audience in without words,” Carpignano explains. “We access her interior life through images, associations, and the more lyrical dream sequences. The production design gives an idea of her social class. When I watch films, it feels unnatural to have someone stop and explain the context.”
I tell Carpignano that my elevator pitch to a friend would be that it’s an Italian-language, arthouse version of The Sopranos from the daughter’s perspective – by coincidence, Chiara’s mother is even called Carmela (Carmela Fumo). “I didn’t have The Sopranos in mind when writing it, but that’s a comparison I welcome,” Carpignano says. “That show also humanises a group of people that are normally sensationalised. What’s groundbreaking is that it’s not about a gangster, it’s about someone who’s sensitive, who goes to a psychiatrist, and who has normal, familiar problems, even though (Tony Soprano) is the head of this criminal enterprise. It shows that people are more than what they do.”
What separates A Chiara from The Sopranos, its prequel, and its various rip-offs, is its young, female protagonist. Whereas sons are pressured to remain in the family business, the daughters are metaphorically blindfolded; in an early scene, Chiara is even chastised for smoking a cigarette. “Chiara’s not someone who needs to learn the rules of what her family does,” Carpignano says. “People don’t have an idea of how the story should unfold or how she should act. Dealing with a girl hasn’t been dealt with that much, other than Meadow Soprano. It was a jumping-off point to see this group of people in a different light.”
For Carpignano’s next film, it seems possible his Calabrian trilogy might become a quadrilogy (more accurately, a tetralogy), as he has no plans to leave Italy. “I always thought of this more as a triptych, and not a trilogy,” the director says. “Meaning they’re three panels that sit next to each other, depicting a certain place at a certain time. I hope to add other panels.” He adds, “I didn’t go to Gioia Tauro to do research. I make films here because I live here. As long as I’m here, and there are things that inspire me around here, I’ll keep going.”
A Chiara will be in UK and Irish cinemas on 15 July.
As part of an ongoing partnership with the curated streaming platform MUBI, Dazed will hold an exclusive screening of A Chiara on July 12 at London’s Garden Cinema. Want to get involved? Tickets are now on sale here for £8 (or £5 for Dazed Club members) – complimentary drinks included.
Find out more about the Dazed Club, and become a member yourself, by signing up here. You can also revisit MUBI’s trailer for A Chiara below.